Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/586

156 Certainpersonio and Alicia, and said, "My dears, you will have thirty-five children, and they will be good and beautiful. Seventeen of your children will be boys, and eighteen girls. The hair of the whole of your children will curl naturally. They will never have the measles, and will have recovered from the whooping-cough before being born."

On hearing such good news, everybody cried out, "Hip, hip, hip, hurrah!" again.

"It only remains," said Grandmarina in conclusion, "to make an end of the fish-bone."

So she took it from the hand of the Princess Alicia, and it instantly flew down the throat of the dreadful little snapping pug-dog, next door, and choked him, and he expired in convulsions.

The subject of our present narrative would appear to have devoted himself to the pirate profession at a comparatively early age. We find him in command of a splendid schooner of one hundred guns loaded to the muzzle, ere yet he had had a party in honor of his tenth birthday.

It seems that our hero, considering himself spited by a Latin grammar master, demanded the satisfaction due from one man of honor to another. Not getting it, he privately withdrew his haughty spirit from such low company, bought a second-hand pocket-pistol, folded up some sandwiches in a paper-bag, made a bottle of Spanish liquorice-water, and entered on a career of valor.

It were tedious to follow Boldheart (for such was his name) through the commencing stages of his story. Suffice it, that we find him bearing the rank of Captain Boldheart, reclining in full uniform on a crimson hearth-rug spread out upon the quarter-deck of his schooner, "The Beauty," in the China Seas. It was a lovely